Clearly, I am a huge proponent of homeschooling. I truly believe in my heart that (for some people) it represents the absolute best method of education. As a result, it is easy to focus on the good things ... the special things ... the really awesome stuff. Educating our children is such a personal and important thing, so whether they are home schooled, privately schooled, or publicly schooled, we (as educators) tend to be very careful about admitting to any shortcomings of our teaching methods. As homeschoolers ... always under the watchful eye of skeptics and professional educators ... we can tend to conceal those weaknesses even more.
The fact of the matter is that whenever a human being is part of the equation ... there WILL be flaws.
Every home school will deal with its own issues, its own shortcomings, its own challenges. Our struggles may or may not be the same as those of some of our fellow home schoolers. Sometimes it will seem like we are the ONLY family on earth that struggles with a certain something. If we let it, that certain something will make us second guess our decision to home school. We cannot allow that to happen. We must try to deal with those issues, yes, because ignoring them doesn't do anyone any good at all, but we cannot allow them to derail all of the GOOD things that are happening in our homes.
Confession time.
The one thing I really struggle with in teaching homeschool is avoiding the terrifying death valley of procrastination. Let's face it, the very nature of home school is a lot more relaxed than that of traditional schooling. There are generally no time tables, classes in blocks of time, or hard & fast ends to school grading periods. There is no scowling teacher with a grade book and a red pen, poised to slap a big ol' goose egg of a ZERO next to your name for the assignment you failed to turn in on time. Well, at least not in our home school.
It also doesn't help that I spent my own school years putting off for tomorrow anything and everything I could (and should) have done today. I was so completely uninspired when I was in school. HATE is really not too strong of a word to describe my feelings about school way back then. Hearing teachers use words like "book report" ... "project"... "research paper" triggered angst and stomach cramps unparalleled by just about everything except childbirth. Without fail, I'd wait until a day or two before it was due and then I'd scramble to pull it all together. Most of the time I managed to get it done, and do a decent job, but not always. Worst of all, those cram sessions never really resulted in authentic learning. It was a drive by. I picked up a little here and there ... enough to scrape by ... but so much more was either glossed over or missed entirely. Books that should have been savored and enjoyed were hurriedly devoured having never really tasted them. Research was completed without ever enjoying the wondrous process of discovery.
Procrastination is something I've largely conquered after struggling with it for most of my life, but even so, there are times when I fall back into those old habits. In the safe, comfortable confines of our home classroom - void of clocks, rigid schedules, red pens, and zeros - it is particularly easy to allow my kids to embrace that bad habit as well.
Recently, my oldest daughter had a very big project for scouts to complete, and she had most of a year to do it. In the busyness of every day life, both of us managed to put off dealing with that project until the 11th hour. Oh, true, I did mention it to her ... many times ... over the course of the year, but I didn't really put any pressure on her. I just figured she was working on the papers and turning them in to her leader as they were completed. I should have known better, she is MY CHILD after all. When I was 9, given the same set of circumstances, I'd have put it off too. Then came the deadline. Through my daughter I was taken back in time ... back to the stress, the frustration, that overwhelming feeling of the impossible, the realization that all the joy of living would be lost and every moment consumed until that mountain of a project was completed. For a child who so rarely has to deal with this sort of thing it was all the more painful. As the tears poured down her face, and as she contemplated giving up and not continuing in scouts, I felt the pain of failure in my own heart.
I've never really stressed out about my ability to teach my kids anything ... ok, well I'm a little stressed about "The Talk", but other than that I have been nothing but confident. Math, grammar, writing, science ... none of it scares me in the least. But today I discovered that there is a subtle foe that I must drag to the surface and deal with head on. Even though we do not have schedules and deadlines, I really need to train my children to NOT procrastinate. If I fail to do so they will certainly leave this home-based school and be faced with a challenging reality that they may not be prepared for. In the midst of the academics that happen on a comfortable couch, I need to begin to light a fire of urgency under my dearly loved children. That, my friends, is by far the hardest thing I'll have to teach in homeschool, but teach it I must.
The fact of the matter is that whenever a human being is part of the equation ... there WILL be flaws.
Every home school will deal with its own issues, its own shortcomings, its own challenges. Our struggles may or may not be the same as those of some of our fellow home schoolers. Sometimes it will seem like we are the ONLY family on earth that struggles with a certain something. If we let it, that certain something will make us second guess our decision to home school. We cannot allow that to happen. We must try to deal with those issues, yes, because ignoring them doesn't do anyone any good at all, but we cannot allow them to derail all of the GOOD things that are happening in our homes.
Confession time.
The one thing I really struggle with in teaching homeschool is avoiding the terrifying death valley of procrastination. Let's face it, the very nature of home school is a lot more relaxed than that of traditional schooling. There are generally no time tables, classes in blocks of time, or hard & fast ends to school grading periods. There is no scowling teacher with a grade book and a red pen, poised to slap a big ol' goose egg of a ZERO next to your name for the assignment you failed to turn in on time. Well, at least not in our home school.
It also doesn't help that I spent my own school years putting off for tomorrow anything and everything I could (and should) have done today. I was so completely uninspired when I was in school. HATE is really not too strong of a word to describe my feelings about school way back then. Hearing teachers use words like "book report" ... "project"... "research paper" triggered angst and stomach cramps unparalleled by just about everything except childbirth. Without fail, I'd wait until a day or two before it was due and then I'd scramble to pull it all together. Most of the time I managed to get it done, and do a decent job, but not always. Worst of all, those cram sessions never really resulted in authentic learning. It was a drive by. I picked up a little here and there ... enough to scrape by ... but so much more was either glossed over or missed entirely. Books that should have been savored and enjoyed were hurriedly devoured having never really tasted them. Research was completed without ever enjoying the wondrous process of discovery.
Procrastination is something I've largely conquered after struggling with it for most of my life, but even so, there are times when I fall back into those old habits. In the safe, comfortable confines of our home classroom - void of clocks, rigid schedules, red pens, and zeros - it is particularly easy to allow my kids to embrace that bad habit as well.
Recently, my oldest daughter had a very big project for scouts to complete, and she had most of a year to do it. In the busyness of every day life, both of us managed to put off dealing with that project until the 11th hour. Oh, true, I did mention it to her ... many times ... over the course of the year, but I didn't really put any pressure on her. I just figured she was working on the papers and turning them in to her leader as they were completed. I should have known better, she is MY CHILD after all. When I was 9, given the same set of circumstances, I'd have put it off too. Then came the deadline. Through my daughter I was taken back in time ... back to the stress, the frustration, that overwhelming feeling of the impossible, the realization that all the joy of living would be lost and every moment consumed until that mountain of a project was completed. For a child who so rarely has to deal with this sort of thing it was all the more painful. As the tears poured down her face, and as she contemplated giving up and not continuing in scouts, I felt the pain of failure in my own heart.
I've never really stressed out about my ability to teach my kids anything ... ok, well I'm a little stressed about "The Talk", but other than that I have been nothing but confident. Math, grammar, writing, science ... none of it scares me in the least. But today I discovered that there is a subtle foe that I must drag to the surface and deal with head on. Even though we do not have schedules and deadlines, I really need to train my children to NOT procrastinate. If I fail to do so they will certainly leave this home-based school and be faced with a challenging reality that they may not be prepared for. In the midst of the academics that happen on a comfortable couch, I need to begin to light a fire of urgency under my dearly loved children. That, my friends, is by far the hardest thing I'll have to teach in homeschool, but teach it I must.
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